STORM DAYS
This hollow, unrevealed sky.
Dipping, a magpie attempts a new meridian,
A straight flight to food or shelter.
The dead elms’ reaching fingers quiver;
Power chords, the cables roar.
We each and all must huddle and endure,
With the sparrows, with the ever joyous,
Garrulous sparrows – delicate and subtle
In their design, a clutch of heartbeats,
Warm, communal.
No malevolence in the weather.
No malfeasance in the storm.
Another day to sing about.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birds, February, flight, grey days, landscape, magpie, moments, more rain, nature, nesting, Poetry, rain, shelter, sparrows, storm, weather | 4 Comments »
RETURNING SONG
Before daybreak,
In quieter airs,
A smaller dawn.
As a blackbird sings,
Before the hint of light,
An old man settles,
Rises,
Releases,
Returns.
Leaving the complexity, leaving the overlay of moments,
We are a simple tune, one or two notes,
A nursery rhyme, guileless,
Needing no elaboration.
Leaving the moments, leaving the overlay of complexity,
We are, always have been, a little dance, a gesture,
A ripple, delighted perturbation,
Needing no justification.
Yesterday on a distant coast,
Storm waters uncovered footprints
Left and right, made by wanderers
Nine hundred thousand years ago.
Traces return, unexpected,
Vanish, unexpected.
These roaring tides, these sands,
These comings and goings,
Noticed, unnoticed.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged being, dawn, death, father, memory, moving on, remembering, requiem, time | 8 Comments »
Four pieces from early this morning, ancestral mutters: sky crowns and words from the Anglo-Saxon.
SIGNIFICATOR
The whispers of the stars of dawn,
Rooted in deep paths, seated mind.
Mind that seeks names only,
Seeks genealogies, plumbs down fathoms,
The pitch of rightness.
To themselves they whisper,
Remembering the weave and twist of gold,
The movers in the shadows,
The movers of twilight,
The flickering torchlight,
The muffled, shuffled feet of steady procession,
Of circular dance taking up positions,
Constellations of mirrored geometries
Winding up time before babes yawn,
Before the aches of morning stretch and sigh.
Before the biting cold, the stirring of embered dawn.
Before has passed.
Before has misted away.
The whispered eloquence of now,
A tranquil moment turned and knotted,
A place remembered on a silent road:
Signpost, crossed paths, significator.
—-
FIRE PRAYER
I kneel, cold water,
Before the fire to kindle,
A prayer for light and warmth:
Cold water, flying cloud.
For spark and roaring:
Cold wave, cold tide.
For return of belonging,
For reason to remain.
—-
WANDERER
The lament of the dispossessed –
The long diminishing curlew.
The urgent, soft cries of lovers –
Wild geese, wild geese.
The road is a way but not a home.
The footsteps of others, small consolation
When they have vanished to the horizon,
Gone on before, singing the old song.
Cloud-cloaked wanderer tasting salt.
His children, weighed metre,
The lilt of left and right.
—
ACHE
Raked by claws
(This wolf cold).
Blood stain tumbling
Clear watered pools:
These clouds of squall
In dawn skies.
World’s ribs sigh
And shiver –
The ache
Of onwards.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged February, fire, hearth, landscape, morning, paths, Poetry, roads, sky crowns, stars, storm, the wanderer, Winter | Leave a Comment »
VALLEY SPIRIT
Over the last hill
Our prize is the view
Where the village nests,
Wood wreathed, woodsmoke.
Gathered fields almost,
Almost ready for spring
But patient, cautious,
Unhurried.
As unhurried as the morning.
Its grey lambswool clouds,
A blanket for Imbolc.
—
CROSS-HATCH
Imbolc morning:
Clouds like wolves,
And sheep.
Sun on all.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Devon, February, Haiku-ish, Imbolc, landscape, morning, nature, Poetry, seasons, time, weather | 2 Comments »
DAWN CHORUS AND MOMENTS OF FROST
As if this feather, slow-turning, falls,
One breath of ice, branching blades
Arcing ghosts of fern, arced ghost of forests.
Pinioned cold, eager, aware, edge fractured.
Fingertips feeling for pattern, the familiar
Stretched pale, translucent.
As the scattered, sprinkled pierce of sound,
Woven between moonlit pale dawn wind,
Tumbling, cascades and choirs,
A flurry of beak and breast-soft down.
As all life joined up by song,
No less, no more meaning than this.
Small hearts full and pouring,
The vessel, vehicle, of the world.
No more and no less than this:
The opening of small mouths,
The fast tremble of accepting hearts.
Light now, and slow revolutions through space.
This place, placement, placid, pellucid.
Transcendent fingers frosting fine feathers,
Growing, though not grasping,
Water flowers framed in ice.
Small time, halted, crystalline.
Slow arcs of how things are,
How they happen.
Seen, unseen, diverted, amalgamated.
Dawn chorus and the moments of frost.
Suspended breath, then
Light and song.
No more, nor no less
Than this.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged before dawn, birds, coincidence, dawn, dawn chorus, expansion into space, frost patterns, landscape, mind, moon, nature, Poetry, silence, Sound, unity, Winter | 6 Comments »
On long tides
The rivers rest.
Longer than
Long moments
Of memory.
Swaying words
Swinging between meanings.
Lost days
Remembered and forgotten,
Sweet details, seasons.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged languid, memory, mind, moments, Poetry, seasons, thought, tides | 2 Comments »
TALLIS EXULTANT
Golden moon rests
Upon a throne of low cloud.
All night long-
As bright as day.
Dawn shall not diminish her:
Sinking radiant
Into new lands.
A long music,
A choir of days.
Tallis exultant.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged atmosphere, dawn, full moon, landscape, light, moon, music, nature, Poetry, Thomas Tallis, world | 2 Comments »
THE SUBJECT AS OBJECT,
OBJECT AS GROUND
OF BEING.
ON EDGES
AND BELONGINGS.
Tat tvam asi
(That I am)
How to merge,
how to remain,
how to see beyond corners,
in darkness wells.
In deserts,
the sand-filled mouths of raving saints.
In forests,
the still elegance of shadowed eyed.
How to merge, yet remain.
How to allow in,
yet keep clambering upwards.
I.
Mistaken identity.
The signpost as the destination.
Cleverness and guile all our days,
we forget to let go the tight bands,
corsetted edge, held in,
possessed and unpossessed,
apart, separated,
vulnerable to elsewhere,
withered by time,
an erosion of horizons,
alluvial plains, fluvial deposits,
drumlins, morraines.
The debris of becoming something else.
A knot, nor a net.
Next, betwixt, between.
Amongst.
A singular deception.
A swell, a tide, a sea, a surge.
A chorus of voices.
Solar mansions.
A circle divided remains a returning path.
name me and I shall vanish,
dancing around the fire.
Foolishly,
I know all things,
but have forgotten how to dream,
and so am rootless
awaiting celestial bees.
Meander.
The great river.
The sky roofed path.
Wonder of wonders.
Breath out.
Looking,
it eludes us.
Remain still, somehow,
forgetting skin.
A vessel.
Is it form, is it emptiness?
Neither, nor, not.
No lessening is it,
ever, ever.
—–
A roaming around ideas on Self, what is ours, what is beyond, where memory might abide, and asking why should there be limits to our wonder.
Stirred by “Immunity” http://manoftheworld.wordpress.com. I am always a we, a cellular empire. I is also a view, a sharing and borrowing of voice.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged collective, consciousness, group, non-self, Poetry, reality, self-, the owning of consciousness | 19 Comments »
DUET
(two ghosts in blue mirror).
a spontaneity of words by Simon Lilly and Jessica Ryan. This began when I commented on a picture Jessica published alongside her blog just before Christmas. http://soveryvery.wordpress.com.
It turned out quite nicely, I think, so here it is:
That image is what?
Ordinary, unspectacular, mute,
but made something perfect
by colour,detail and the art of looking.
Ambience Radiating Truth,
a little art.
The light, the air,
the moment.
A conspiracy for
rather than against me.
Maybe art is just that –
a conspiracy for.
A pattern infiltrated
and worn upon oneself,
a brief belonging.
All too brief.
And we gasp.
And we grasp after
the flickering perfection
of the pattern, seen.
Seen is eaten by heart,
head not withstood
(though best ignored
or humoured with thin smiles).
Seen is been seen,
marked by all, included, amongst.
We are twill, tweed, embroidered,
embroiled regardless of high or low regard.
Our guard is dropped,
melting into the passionless is.
Seen and consumed,
heart’s regard (less more high low)
is consummated.
Our guard,
an empty collection of warp and weft,
never understood the story of orange and blue.
A tunnelling path
carved through flickering time,
framed roads, named, unnamed,
tasted with hesitant tongue, delighted ear.
Pulsed, a walking rhythm,
a posy of moments, empty and full.
Shall we walk together down the long evenings,
birdsong and laughter,
or fear the empty bridge,
the shallowed gold pit?
A pocket full.
Ignore the hard edges
pretending the end.
The pellucid vibrancy spills out,
centers the path tickling the birdsong’s laugh
off of our tongues.
And so we shall.
What else to do with bursting moments
but walk the gloaming?
The gloomy gloaming
of the joker tomb.
Mock serious and smirking.
It cannot hold a moment longer,
bursting with radiate light.
We can afford generosity,
shedding skins, attaining orbits.
Starlit, wandering,
trying out new names with new lips,
forgetting, laughing at footprints:
leaf litter on an autumn path.
Lost once, lost twice,
a cliff of thought,
a tunnelled, mysterious evening.
Mapled flutter,
mapled collapse, mapled incense.
Hesitant even,
hastened steps, a whispered wind,
a small bowl of sorrow,
a small bowl of delight.
I’ve dreamed of a third bowl,
wobbling on its edge.
Its sound is round,
debating gravity and stillness.
A heart or notion, a simple holding,
a significator, the dreamer mirrored dream,
a season, a map, a world of half light and half dark,
rotating,
a long whispered vowel.
A calling between consonants.
Aggravating the spin,
hand to hand among the maple trim.
The cartography of my heart,
studied in your grin,
the sugar portending a notion of splendor
made dormant.
The punctuation pauses,
cupped, before the sound begins.
A sweet sound.
A sweet silence.
That path between, slyly negotiated:
a low sigh.
The rustle of the blood’s report.
The mirrored blush shies cheek
and dropping leaf.
Is this the place
where it all starts?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, autumn evening, blue ghosts, conversation, duet, golden leaves, image, landscape, nature, park paths, Poetry, polarity, words | 4 Comments »
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